The Disentanglers. Lang Andrew
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Название: The Disentanglers

Автор: Lang Andrew

Издательство: Public Domain

Жанр: Зарубежная классика

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СКАЧАТЬ enough,’ said Clancy.

      ‘Not half,’ said Bathe.

      ‘A man has his duties in his own country,’ said Brooke.

      ‘May I ask whether in fact your sorrows at this discovery have been intense?’ asked Merton.

      ‘I was a good deal cut up at first,’ said Clancy, ‘I being the latest recruit. Bathe had practically given up hope, and had seen some one else.’ Mr. Bathe drooped his head, and blushed. ‘Brooke laughed. Indeed we all laughed, though we felt rather foolish. But what are we to do? Should we write her a Round Robin? Bathe says he ought to be the man, because he was first man in, and I say I ought to be the man, because I am not out.’

      ‘I would not build much on that,’ said Merton, and he was sure that he heard a rustle behind the screen, and a slight struggle. Julia was trying to emerge, restrained by Miss Crofton.

      ‘I knew,’ said Clancy, ‘that there was something– that there were other fellows. But that I learned, more or less, under the seal of confession, so to speak.’

      ‘At a picnic,’ said Merton.

      At this moment the screen fell with a crash, and Julia emerged, her eyes blazing, while Miss Crofton followed, her hat somewhat crushed by the falling screen. The three young men in Holy Orders, all of them desirable young men, arose to their feet, trembling visibly.

      ‘Apostates!’ cried Julia, who had by far the best of the dramatic situation and pressed her advantage. ‘Recreants! was it for such as you that I pointed to the crown of martyrdom? Was it for your shattered ideals that I have wept many a night on Serena’s faithful breast?’ She pointed to Miss Crofton, who enfolded her in an embrace. ‘You!’ Julia went on, aiming at them the finger of conviction. ‘I am but a woman, weak I may have been, wavering I may have been, but I took you for men! I chose you to dare, perhaps to perish, for a Cause. But now, triflers that you are, boys, mere boys, back with you to your silly games, back to the thoughtless throng. I have done.’

      Julia, attended by Miss Crofton, swept from the chamber, under her indignation (which was quite as real as any of her other emotions) the happiest woman in London. She had no more occasion for remorse, no ideals had she sensibly injured. Her entanglements were disentangled. She inhaled the fragrance of orange blossoms from afar, and heard the marriage music in the chapel of the Guards. Meanwhile the three curates and Merton felt as if they had been whipped.

      ‘Trust a woman to have the best of it,’ muttered Merton admiringly. ‘And now, Clancy, may I offer a hasty luncheon to you and your friends before we go to Lord’s? Your business has been rather rapidly despatched.’

      The conversation at luncheon turned exclusively on cricket.

      VI. A LOVER IN COCKY

      It cannot be said that the bearers of the noblest names in the land flocked at first to the offices of Messrs. Gray and Graham. In fact the reverse, in the beginning, was the case. Members even of the more learned professions held aloof: indeed barristers and physicians never became eager clients. On the other hand, Messrs. Gray and Graham received many letters in such handwritings, such grammar, and such orthography, that they burned them without replying. A common sort of case was that of the young farmer whose widowed mother had set her heart on marriage with ‘a bonny labouring boy,’ a ploughman.

      ‘We can do nothing with these people,’ Merton remarked. ‘We can’t send down a young and elegant friend of ours to distract the affections of an elderly female agriculturist. The bonny labouring boy would punch the fashionable head; or, at all events, would prove much more attractive to the widow than our agent.

      ‘Then there are the members of the Hebrew community. They hate mixed marriages, and quite right too. I deeply sympathise. But if Leah has let her affections loose on young Timmins, an Anglo-Saxon and a Christian, what can we do? How stop the mésalliance? We have not, in our little regiment, one fair Hebrew boy to smile away her maiden blame among the Hebrew mothers of Maida Vale, and to cut out Timmins. And of course it is as bad with the men. If young Isaacs wants to marry Miss Julia Timmins, I have no Rebecca to slip at him. The Semitic demand, though large and perhaps lucrative, cannot be met out of a purely Aryan supply.’

      Business was pretty slack, and so Merton rather rejoiced over the application of a Mrs. Nicholson, from The Laburnums, Walton-on-Dove, Derbyshire. Mrs. Nicholson’s name was not in Burke’s ‘Landed Gentry,’ and The Laburnums could hardly be estimated as one of the stately homes of England. Still, the lady was granted an interview. She was what the Scots call ‘a buddy;’ that is, she was large, round, attired in black, between two ages, and not easily to be distinguished, by an unobservant eye, from buddies as a class. After greetings, and when enthroned in the client’s chair, Mrs. Nicholson stated her case with simplicity and directness.

      ‘It is my ward,’ she said, ‘Barbara Monypenny. I must tell you that she was left in my charge till she is twenty-six. I and her lawyers make her an allowance out of her property, which she is to get when she marries with my consent, at whatever age.’

      ‘May I ask how old the lady is at present?’ said Merton.

      ‘She is twenty-two.’

      ‘Your kindness in taking charge of her is not not wholly uncompensated?’

      ‘No, an allowance is made to me out of the estate.’

      ‘An allowance which ends on her marriage, if she marries with your consent?’

      ‘Yes, it ends then. Her uncle trusted me a deal more than he trusted Barbara. She was strange from a child. Fond of the men,’ as if that were an unusual and unbecoming form of philanthropy.

      ‘I see, and she being an heiress, the testator was anxious to protect her youth and innocence?’

      Mrs. Nicholson merely sniffed, but the sniff was affirmative, though sarcastic.

      ‘Her property, I suppose, is considerable? I do not ask from impertinent curiosity, nor for exact figures. But, as a question of business, may we call the fortune considerable?’

      ‘Most people do. It runs into six figures.’

      Merton, who had no mathematical head, scribbled on a piece of paper. The result of his calculations (which I, not without some fever of the brow, have personally verified) proved that ‘six figures’ might be anything between 100,000l. and 999,000l. 19s. 11¾d.

      ‘Certainly it is very considerable,’ Merton said, after a few minutes passed in arithmetical calculation. ‘Am I too curious if I ask what is the source of this opulence?’

      ‘“Wilton’s Panmedicon, or Heal All,” a patent medicine. He sold the patent and retired.’

      Merton shuddered.

      ‘It would be Pammedicum if it could be anything,’ he thought, ‘but it can’t, linguistically speaking.’

      ‘Invaluable as a subterfuge,’ said Mrs. Nicholson, obviously with an indistinct recollection of the advertisement and of the properties of the drug.

      Merton construed the word as ‘febrifuge,’ silently, and asked: ‘Have you taken the young lady much into society: has she had many opportunities of making a choice? You are dissatisfied with the choice, I understand, which she has made?’

      ‘I don’t let her see anybody if I can help it. Fire СКАЧАТЬ